Saturday, January 08, 2011

It's a warming winter mailout from Tracer Trails, with all the turn-of-the-year news you can stomach on top of a giant nut roast, christmas cheeses and three gallons of Hanna Tuulikki's spiced whisky toddy.

Great vibes were enjoyed at some of our best-attended gigs yet; we even won a Herald Angel Award for Retreat! and, according to The List, Tracer Trails is now the 74th hottest thing in Scotland. Next year we will be aiming for 51st hottest, with five totally steaming shows already booked, and a sweltering new project due to commence in January. Prickly heat!

FORTHCOMING GIGS:

Tuesday 25 Jan 2011: Withered Hand + Woodpigeon + de Selby @ Stereo, Glasgow"Very special double-header: Woodpigeon visits from Calgary to see a slice of Scotland with his friend Withered Hand, who will be playing his (their) first full-band Glasgow date since last summer."Tickets £6 / £5 from http://www.wegottickets.com/event/102966

Friday 28 Jan 2011: The Jeffrey Lewis & Peter Stampfel Folk Show + Two Wings @ Mono, Glasgow"Wow! This is going to be a singular event, for sure. NYC anti-folk star Jeffrey Lewis (Rough Trade) is bringing to the UK his collaborative show with 60s psych-folk original Peter Stampfel (of Holy Modal Rounders / The Fugs). Jeffrey and Peter will be trading songs, chatting, playing and singing on each other’s stuff, ably assisted by a vintage Jeff Lewis backing ensemble."Tickets £8 / £6 from http://www.wegottickets.com/event/103377

Tracer Trails will also be trying something unprecedented in 2011. To mark the 60th anniversary of the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh, we're commissioning three of our all-time favourite Scottish artists - Alasdair Roberts, Aileen Campbell and Drew Wright (Wounded Knee) - to create brand new works based on excavations conducted in the extraordinary Archives of the School.

The School of Scottish Studies played a crucial role in the Folk Revival of the 50s and 60s. Fieldworkers including Hamish Henderson and Alan Lomax conducted landmark research at the School, and their field recordings are now held – on open reels, cassettes, discs and even wax cylinders – as part of the School’s massive Archive of traditional songs, tales, oral history, ethnographic photography and video. It's a totally unique and invaluable resource, and we're incredibly excited to have the opportunity to open it up a little through the creation of three completely new works.

Aileen, Alasdair and Drew will be in residence in the Archives for 12 weeks from January 13th; their work will be developed over the summer, and will be toured round Scotland in autumn 2011.

We'll be documenting progress throughout with a blog at www.archivetrails.com . Please check it out, from mid-January, for journals from the artists giving insights into their process, plus plenty of images and tape excerpts from the Archives. For now, full info can be found at www.tracertrails.com/projects .

This project is supported by grants from Creative Scotland and The University of Edinburgh.

I THINK THAT'S IT

If you read this far: thank you so very much. I hope you found some of this news to be good news for you. Write back if you like!

Search This Blog

A wee bit of background, etc.

This all kicked off as a print (Xerox) magazine in 1977 and now it's on the interweb. Named after the title track on The Dictators Go Girl Crazy (40 years old in 2015) the purpose has always been to uphold what’s good and pure and right in terms of rock’n’roll and its satellites.

It has nothing, nada, nowt to do with any festival(s) that devalue our namesake so don't send mp3's or anything else with regard to setting course for a career in the music business or anywhere else.

Take a look at what goes on here and if you think your fare fits then drop a line and maybe we can work something out.

I plan to put PDFs of all physical issues up here eventually and in addition, all Rockin’ Bones, Watch This and Fuzzbuzz.Maybe Psychedelic Basement, etc from Sounds too so that everything is in one place. Some of the quality of the source material isn’t terribly good but it’s all I have to work with. It will take some time. The 3 page pilot issue, “NBT 0” from September 1976 never survived as far as I know. Some of the content is a wee bit embarrassing at this juncture but every journey has to start someplace, right?